Sebastien for a while has been working on
all-things-security in the Mono stack, in today's blog entry
he describes how
to write an SSL server in 3 simple steps.

He uses that to showcase the Mono.Security assembly and the
excellent work that Carlos Guzman Alvarez has done on the
TLS/SSL stack in Mono (Carlos is also the man behind the Firebird
database provider for .NET).

In any case, Sebastien's blog is
packed with technical information on a wide range of
cryptographic and security topics (specially related to Mono).

F-Spot failed during the demo, the problem was that on CVS
Geoff just made Mono.Data.Sqlite support both the old Sqlite
and the new Sqlite3, a tiny logic error gets the autodetection
wrong (which is now fixed).

Dmitry Robsman, myself, Scott Guthrie, Daniel López

With the creators of ASP.NET (Dmitry and Scott) and the
original author mod_mono (Daniel).

Daniel is at the conference demostrating at the conference
is BitRock installer for
Unix which is an Install-Shield like installer for Linux,
BSD, Solaris and Windows and works with in GUI, text or
unattended modes.

As a proof of his installer, he has a sample Mono
installer for Linux that includes XSP and Apache for folks
that want to get a quick head-start on Mono. The simplest
Mono installation on Unix so far.

There is a lot of Java presence, and some PHP presence at
the conference.

In other news: am running IBM's Derby in Mono, without
having to write a line of Java. Love!

Lluis has been working on a new Dynamic Code Generation API
for Mono. A detailed blog post with source code, examples and
rationale is available here.

Lluis' new code generation API is a medium-level API and
sits happily between the CIL (too low level for certain tasks)
and generating C# source code (too high level and slow to
produce, compile and dynamically load for certain tasks).

Joseph Hill

Joseph has been running www.gotmono.net for a while,
and today I discovered his blog. What I
found interesting is that he has been maintaining ASP.NET
applications and ports of Mono (here) and his blog
talks about his experiences.

It is an interesting read for those interested in Mono
deployment and performance.

Although he is beta testing some new ASP.NET-based forums,
the current forums are very active.

Ariel Faigon on Usability

Being the optimist that I am, I will go to sleep thinking
that the count is not complete, and that the Electoral College
will fix the world for us. If the supreme court made some
hand tuning to democracy last time, I will hope some other
hand tuning can still happen.

To me, its like an adventure, like in the Timeline
movie: we get to go back to the middle age and explore
a world where science and intelligence are a liability.

Nixon got impeached on his second term, there is hope ;-).

NPlot for Gtk#

In the paste few days I had been doing a Gtk# facade for NPLot: a wonderful
library to do plots.

There was not much in the way of porting. NPlot alredy
supported two front-ends: an ASP.NET one and a Windows.Forms
one, so this is only an addition. The engine is completely
independent of the presentation layer, which is good.

NPlot exposed bugs in our C# compiler and in
System.Drawing, they are both fixed on CVS HEAD and the 1-0
branches. Sadly these fixes came after Mono 1.0.4 and 1.1.2
were built, so to use it you will need to get CVS.

Erik
discovered NPlot a few weeks after Nat and myself were talking
about widgetry that we would like to see available for
developers. We were talking about scientific (2D plots, 3D
plots, animations) and business widgetry (validating data
entries, Gnumeric-like data entry, database-bound widgets).

NPlot fills the 2D plotting gap quite nicely. We had
looked at some Gtk+ solutions, but this solution requires no
bindings at all and can also work in batch mode or to produce
plots for web applications.

I want a music player that will play nicely with Linux and
from a company that will not try to sabotage me at their
will. When I buy music from the Apple Music Store, I can not
play it on Linux.

I know about FairKeys,
but this is not a product that could be shipped by Linux
distributions that are afraid of getting into a lawsuit. So
it effectively can not enter the mass market of free software
users.

I have always been annoyed at this, and today I found this
on BoingBoing: iTunes
upgrade used to remove more features (disguissed as an
"upgrade") and a
follow up (through Dave Winer).

Certainly Apple has a couple of years of advantage in terms
of improving their product compared to their competition, but
am going to spend my money into funding products and companies
that are not out to screw me or limit what I can do with the
device I purchased.

If people have good experiences on a good portable player,
let me know. Am looking for something with 20 gigs of space
and possibly ogg support. FM and recording are pluses, but
not very important.